Dr. Michael DeBakey performs an operation to implant an artificial heart assisting device called a left ventricular bypass into the chest of coal miner Marcel DeRudder in 1966.

Photo By Ralph Morse./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Dr. Michael DeBakey checks on a patient.

Photo By Ralph Morse/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Dr. Michael DeBakey performs an operation to implant an artificial heart assisting device called a left ventricular bypass, aka the pump, into the chest of coal miner Marcel DeRudder in 1966.

Photo By Ralph Morse./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Dr. Michael DeBakey is pictured before performing an operation to implant an artificial heart assisting device called a left ventricular bypass, aka the pump.

Photo By Pam Francis/Getty Images

Cardiologist Dr. Denton Cooley is photographed on May 2, 1998 in Houston.

Photo By Dominique Nabokov/Getty Images

American surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey is pictured at Methodist Hospital in Houston June 1990.

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Dr. Denton Cooley: Basketball phenom?

He made a living with his scalpel, but before his career in medicine he was pretty good with a basketball, too. See photos of the famed Houston heart surgeon playing in Madison Square Garden and learn the full story at HoustonChronicle.com.

Forty-five years ago this week, a Houston doctor scrubbed in and made history.

Dr. Denton Cooley – a name still revered by the Houston medical community – performed the first full artificial heart transplant in a human patient on April 4, 1969.

The recipient, Haskell Karp, lived for 64 hours on the artificial heart before a human donor could be found, according to the Texas State Historical Association, but eventually died a day later from renal failure and pneumonia.

Regardless, Karp's artificial ticker now sits in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.Cooley and fellow Houston surgeon Michael E. DeBakey were among the leading pioneers of heart surgeries during the 1960s.

The riff centered around the device used in the Karp transplant, which had been developed by DeBakey and researcher Dr. Domingo Liotta at DeBakey's Baylor lab in Houston.

Liotta allegedly took the heart to Cooley after DeBakey told him it wasn't ready for human use. Cooley claims he and Liotta used the device to develop a new heart which was used in Haskell.

Many saw it as theft. Cooley saw it as necessity, according to his biography "100,000 Hearts: A Surgeon's Memoirs."

"I'd reached a critical point in the procedure," he wrote. "Was I going to let Mr. Karp die on the operating table or try to save his life by whatever means? I decided to proceed with implanting the total artificial heart."

The 40-year feud was spotlighted in a story by Life magazine in 1970 (many of the photos appear with this article), before the two reconciled in 2007.